The hacker exploited Apple’s online systems for finding and wiping a stolen laptop or iPhone, and wiped his devices clean.

And even though he was a techy person, Mat’s laptop wasn’t backed up.

“Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook,” he wrote, “I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.”

Take note: this man HAD backed up his computer. But the backup failed too. It was corrupted.

So we need to check our backups to make sure they’re working correctly.

And we need to have what they call “redundancy” in our backups. Multiple backups, completely independent of each other. And in different physical locations.

This is what I’m currently doing:

I have an external hard drive, and my computer backs up to it every hour. (I work on Mac and it has a utility called Time Machine, which automates this whole process. Thank goodness I don’t have to remember it.) I have already had one external hard drive fail on me, so I know this method is not bulletproof.

I also have a free Dropbox account, which is another kind of cloud backup. I have a Dropbox folder on my computer, and when I’m working on something important, I just shift it into that folder. That way, it’s backing up to my external hard drive, my Crashplan account, and my Dropbox — simultaneously and automatically.

I have numerous USB drives in my office and in my handbag (I like the brightly coloured ones — they’re easier to find!), and I’m often copying important things to them.

When I’m getting to a really crucial stage of a manuscript, I tend to email it to myself via gmail at the end of the day, so that I’ve got yet another offsite backup, in my gmail account. Another side benefit of this is you have a version with a date on it, if you want to check back through changes you’ve made!

Just reading all that, I do sound a bit nuts. Hang on while I adjust my foil hat to protect me from alien transmissions. 😉

But I really, really don’t want to lose my hard work.

Use good passwords

A related issue — particularly relevant to our various online backup options — is to use strong passwords. You don’t want anyone getting at this valuable stuff you’re storing in the cloud.

I learned the password issue the hard way a couple of years ago when my gmail account was hacked, and someone sent out spam links to all my contacts. My mistake: I’d used the same password for multiple sites, even though EVERYONE says not to do that. 😉 Somehow, someone found a password for another site, tested it on my gmail account, and voila! they were in.

Yes, we all know not to double-up on passwords. And yet, many of us do it. If you’ve done that, learn from my experience and change them today.

We’ve also got to stop using easily-guessed passwords. Yes, we’ve all done it! 😉 But we have to protect ourselves and our work.

We’re nagged to use longer passwords, with mixtures of upper and lower case characters, numbers and punctuation marks. We hear it again and again.

And yet, a survey in 2012 found that the most commonly used passwords were STILL “password”, “123456” and “12345678”!

In April 2013, there was a kerfuffle with hacking attempts on WordPress blogs. Weak passwords, and the username “admin” were the key vulnerabilities. If you blog with WordPress — and especially if you have a username of “admin” or “editor” or “moderator” — this article gives simple instructions for how to fix it.

Don’t forget to backup your website too!

My sites are hosted by Hostgator, and I’m really pleased with their prices and services and their 24/7 Live Chat support, and for a long time I just assumed they would be backing up for me and I didn’t have to think about it. It was easier for me to think this!

But then I read some things that made me realise that while they would indeed be backing up their servers, it might not be simple or quick to restore my little site from any webhost’s backup, should I be hacked or suffer some other internet horror. And if I took a day or two to notice I’d been hacked, the backup might have been overwritten! (This wasn’t any particular Hostgator problem, but apparently applies broadly.)

I ended up signing up for Backup Buddy, an add-on that you can buy for WordPress, which has taken the pressure off. I’m not very geeky, but I managed to figure out the instructions for getting it set up, and now it backs up my WordPress sites regularly, and automatically. You can save backups to various online places, or download them to your computer.

Let’s encourage each other to take the security of our work seriously! Our words are worth protecting.

What is your experience? Ever lost your work to hackers or a computer failure?

What backups are you currently running? And are you backing up your blog or website? Tell us what you’ve found to be good.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have decided to become an affiliate for some carefully selected writing, publishing and blogging tools that I use myself and recommend to my friends. This means some of the links on this blog are “affiliate links". If you purchase a product via one of those links, they pay me a small fee for the introduction -- without charging you any extra.

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Comments

Such good advice 🙂
Many years ago, back in the days of floppy discs (!) a friend lost 60K words of a novel when her computer crashed. I determined to back up my own in future, but still found myself forgetting to do it except once in a while, probably every couple of weeks.
I became more committed when I got a book deal, as I couldn’t afford to have to re-write, but nowadays I use a cloud backup – Livedrive – which backs up as I work. Provided I am online, it backs up constantly, so unless their server has a major problem, my stuff is there, and available to share between my laptops at the click of a button.
I’ve not long started blogging, and you are the second person to advise backing that up – so that’s my next priority.
Thanks again for sharing 🙂

Hi Deborah, I remember the days of floppy disks too! And if you were borrowing someone else’s computer, the floppy copy might be all you had, because not everyone could afford a computer back then (hard to imagine now). I still remember the howl of horror that echoed down the halls of the college I was living in back in the 90s… some poor girl had had her entire university essay disappear from her floppy disk. Weeks of research, and due the next day.

We have so many more options for backup now, but we get very lazy about it. (and I do mean WE, including ME! 😉 ) The backups that are constantly updated to the web are good. My Crashplan and Dropbox do that.

Okay, just backed up my family pictures to a third place. So writing and pictures in two different external drives and one internal drive. Thanks for the reminder. I’m still checking out cloud. I like tangible locations.
Elldee

Elldee, it took me ages to finally commit to cloud, especially paid cloud. It was the issue of the photos that did it for me in the end. I have so many from all my travels etc (100GB or more) and would hate to lose them. A year of unlimited Crashplan+ was cheaper than buying another external hard drive, so I took the leap.

But there are heaps of free options for people who have smaller amounts to backup, like the free Dropbox account I have. Some people criticise Dropbox for various reasons, but I’ve found it OK so far. Nothing’s perfect, I guess!

I also use Dropbox as a backup when I’m taking design files to a client’s office on a USB stick. If the USB stick fails on me, I can still access the files from my Dropbox, remotely, and get the client what they need. What we need depends on the way we work. 🙂

Thanks Eric. I’ve used SugarSync too in the past, and one of the handy things about it was that you didn’t have to move everything to a Dropbox folder – you could sync whichever computer folders you wanted.

i was attacked by a ransomware virus. It came in through my pc, traveled up into the cloud and down into my laptop. It corrupted everything. The only things that survived were those I had emailed to myself. So now I have multiple email addresses that I cc with my work regularly. he really important stuff I also keep in paper copy.

I found your article through a Google search on backups for writers, thus the late chime-in.

Have you looked at LastPass for your passwords? I love it and I’m slowly getting rid of my duplicates. There’s even a password update feature, which updates your password on a site ‘automagically’.

I work at my desk 95% of the time. But there’s that 5% where I need to work from my laptop and I want to be able to keep my work up-to-date, without a lot of hair-pulling. I was using SyncToy to keep a back-up on a thumb-drive before. Now, I’m debating having my ‘live’ directory on a thumb drive. Then, it doesn’t matter if I’m working on my laptop or my PC, I’ll have the current copy right there. If that’s what I do, I’m thinking of setting up SyncToy on both PC and laptop, then each computer will have a ‘backup’ of my work.

I’m not sold (yet) on having a backup in the cloud. I felt scattered, having it spread across just 2 computers, plus all my paper notes (no idea what to do there!). I like the idea of the ‘live’ copy always being with me. I may even install Scrivener on the thumb-drive, if that’s possible. Then I could work at any computer. 🙂

Thanks for talking about this. It’s good to hear the potential problems I’m courting by burying my head in the sand.

And it’s so important that we back up our work. It’s precious! I always get alarmed when I hear of writers who have a huge manuscript underway and no backup whatsoever. Glad you are thinking about that.

A handy thing about my Dropbox backup is that as soon as I power up my laptop, so long as I’ve got an internet connection, within a couple of minutes my latest work is all on it. I realise that has limitations if you don’t normally work with internet connection, or if you’re working somewhere for the day that you don’t trust the wifi. Don’t forget that thumb drives fail too, so do always keep a copy in other places as well as the thumb drive. 🙂 Best wishes for your writing!